You want to prove that Milton Friedman is a fascist? It's easy. Quote him.

There are several states that move from Karl Marx-like policies to Adam Smith-like policies and back again in a weekend. So for the states with huge volatility in their income tax policies over time, the differences in growth rates in those periods are really amazingly consistent with tax rates really mattering.

Government spending is taxation. When you look at this, I've never heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity; let alone I've never heard of a poor person taxing himself into prosperity.

If you look at the performance of the zero-income-tax-rate states and the highest-income-tax-rate states, I believe a large amount of their difference is due to taxes. Not only is it true of the last decade, but I took these numbers back 50 years. And, there's not one year in the last 50 where the zero-income-tax-rate states have not outperformed the highest-income-tax-rate states.

People can also change the timing of when they earn and receive their income in response to government policies.

Let me just try to give you sort of the intuitive one here on the stimulus funds. If you have a two-person economy - let's imagine we have two farms, and that's the whole world, just two farms. If one of those farmers gets unemployment benefits, who do you think pays for him? Am I going way over your heads today?

There are 11 states in the United States that in the last 50 years instituted an income tax. So I looked at each of those 11 states over the last 50 years, and I took their current economic metrics and their metrics for the five years before they put in the progressive income tax... Every single state that introduced a progressive income tax has declined as an overall share of the U.S. economy.